The Apple Paycheck
Kenneth A. Margolis, Stephen T. Schreiber, New York Times
"Unhappy iPhone users who would like to use Google services in a more integrated manner and can’t are also Apple’s worst nightmare."No, Apple’s worst nightmare is someone buying an Android phone instead of an iPhone.
Has your 2012 MacBook Air been crashing lately? If so, Google Chrome may be to blame. Google has confirmed that they are at fault for a kernel panic issue which is caused by a graphic resource leak within Chrome. A user in the Apple Support Communities has confirmed that this issue was a mix of the new Intel HD 4000 graphics chip set, Google Chrome and Flash.
Podcasting pioneer Dave Winer asks whether the field needs a reboot.
I’m still looking. Podcasts is definitely not the app I was looking for.
Apple is preparing to make Riccio its new senior VP of hardware engineering, replacing the current SVP Bob Mansfield. The company announced late Thursday that Mansfield is retiring from his post, and that Riccio will be transitioned into his position over a period of several months.
Chrome for iOS, much like its Android relative, features draggable tabs and can sync preferences and bookmarks thanks to Chrome Sync support. This also means that credentials can be synced between desktop Chrome and your smartphone or tablet, letting you quickly log into your favorite sites.
Even after I made it quite abundantly clear that I am quite reasonably techno-literate, I still encountered the hand-wavy “Oh, it’s technical, sonny” answers that added up to little more than “Look, we’re not going to tell you anything.” Or, if I were to be charitable, I could assume simply that neither Manchester Genius nor Matt the Senior Advisor really knew what they were talking about in the slightest, and were just grasping at jargon straws to get me off the line rather than admitting their ignorance.Either way, Apple, I expect better.
Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, confirmed that voice recordings are stored when users ask a spoken question like "What's the weather now?" "This data is only used for Siri's operation and to help Siri improve its understanding and recognition," she said. Muller added that the company takes privacy "very seriously," noting that questions and responses that Siri sends over the Internet are encrypted, and that recordings of your voice are not linked to other information Apple has generated about you. (Siri does upload your contact list, location, and list of stored songs, though, to help it respond to your requests.)
There are certainly worse fates than working at an Apple Store. The company offers decent benefits, including health coverage and a 401K, and looks good on a resume. But so long as there are enough aspiring “specialists” or “geniuses” lining up for their chance to don a blue Apple t-shirt, no worker has much say over what they make or how they’re treated.That’s fundamentally unfair. But it’s also common these days. Corporate profit margins are at an all time high in the U.S., while wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. Companies know they can pay workers less because they’re desperate to hold onto their jobs.
The most obvious answer to the question lies in the Google Maps API's terms of service itself. Google may offer most of its juicy data to developers for their third-party apps (including Apple), but it does place some restrictions on what kind of applications are allowed to be built using Google's API. And in particular, Google restricts those making apps from its APIs from offering real-time navigation or route guidance in their own apps.
Whilst I find the spinning tape deck whimsical and fun, there is no denying that the controls are difficult to hit. The Airplay icon, for example, is easy to miss — the tap target is extremely small.
The early 2000s called, and they want their archaic method of synchronizing data amongst many devices back.
I am scared at what iOS 6 might bring for 3GS woes and I really do think Apple should abandon devices faster (for the user’s sanity) if they aren’t going to make sure that these new updates work just as well on the legacy devices.
You can give impressive presentations from your iPad‚ and perhaps even leave your laptop behind‚ if you prepare well and know what to expect. It's even easier to take to the podium with newer technologies like AirPlay mirroring and the latest version of Keynote for iOS. Here are tips for moving presentations onto your iPad and delivering them live.
Adobe Illustrator continues to be a capable and comprehensive vector illustration package. Users of Illustrator CS4 (and earlier) will find a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade to version CS6, but the decision isn’t as clear-cut for users of CS5. Overall, Illustrator CS6 feels less like a full upgrade and more like a refinement of the previous version. The updated user interface is gorgeous and there are modest performance gains, but those benefits alone are hardly worth the $249 upgrade price.
A cool, customisable interface, visible when you choose, shows users recently used documents, folders and applications so you don't need to go digging around when you need them again. Cleverly, users can drag and drop files from Trickster to Finder or any other application, open files and applications from Trickster, preview them or reveal them in your Mac's Finder.
Essentially, Apple loaned me a brand new laptop—which I purchased and was ultimately reimbursed for as a form of collateral—until I was able to order the upgraded computer I actually wanted, the one we all knew it made more sense to buy.
Shops in the teeming transit hub have seen an iBoost in their bottom line ever since the world’s biggest Apple Store opened there late last year, averaging a 7.5 percent hike in profits, MTA officials said yesterday.
For about a year, Macs have been shipping with a fancy new port on the side called Thunderbolt. We're just on the cusp of seeing this new port on Windows-based PCs, too. What exactly is Thunderbolt, and should you make sure your next computer has it?
Steve laughed — but he rejected it immediately. He said that demo crashes are an unavoidable part of the business, and that his own demos could fail as easily as Gates’. He didn’t want to taunt Gates for something that was beyond his control.
What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting.
Long-term, the switch to iCloud should make for a better-than-ever syncing solution — not just for Yojimbo, but for Mac apps in general. Short-term, however, this is confusing for users and an enormous headache for developers, especially those with apps that predate the Mac App Store.
That’s what many Mac developers are dealing with right now. An app does syncing through MobileMe. Now, it needs to do it through iCloud. Fine. But Apple won’t let an app use iCloud unless it’s sold in the App Store. Fine. But Apple won’t approve an app for the App Store unless it’s sandboxed. And for many developers, sandboxing means that half of their app’s features will either no longer work at all, or will need to be dumbed way, way down. Selling your app there also means being cut off from any kind of simple and direct line of communication with your users.
It’s nice to see podcasts get the same kind of attention as ebooks, though Apple does have a tougher row to hoe here, thanks to full-featured competitors like Downcast and Instacast. Still, a standalone Podcasts app goes a long way towards decluttering iOS’s media playback capabilities, a trend which has already seen Apple split the iPhone’s iPod app into Videos and Music.
At minimum, the new rules represent a major (and hopefully only temporary) setback. It's going to take some time — maybe even a couple of years — before developers learn how to do everything they need to do under App Store restrictions, and Apple learns which of these restrictions could stand some loosening up. And until that happens, there will be some very real limitations on how good a Mac app can be.
Nearly half of retailers in a recent study by Forrester Research and Shop.org said users of tablets – who by a large majority are iPad owners – tend to place bigger online orders on average than users of laptops or desktops. Shoppers on Apple devices like iPhones also outspend shoppers using Android or Blackberry devices, according to IBM, which tracks data from retailers.And while there are twice as many mobile gamers on Android devices in the U.S. as there are on iPhone and iPads, the amount spent by Apple gamers is five times higher than Android gamers, according to international gaming market research firm Newzoo.
While the BTO system ended up costing us 50 percent more than the stock high-end model, it boosted overall performance by 21 percent. Every single test we ran benefitted from the extra RAM, extra storage, extra processing power, or a combination of the upgrades.
True, Pages does a fair bit of what Nisus Writer Pro does and costs less. But Nisus Writer Pro’s higher price is still not unreasonable. And there are things about Nisus Writer Pro’s user interface (like writing in Draft View) and about its special features (including PowerFind) that I, at least, find hard to resist. And although I don’t need Nisus Writer Pro’s long-document features often, I think it makes sense to spend a few more dollars and get Nisus Writer Pro. On the other hand, if you love the Nisus Writer user interface including the powerful find feature but don’t need the other power-user features, take a look at Nisus Writer Express instead.
Our economy is going through trying times, and every hardworking laborer in America and across the globe could use some added pay. And there is plenty of reason to believe that corporations need to change their attitude toward labor expenses. But the force that will be most effective in creating that change is the force of self-interest. It is difficult to create a retail-shopping experience that will separate you from the pack if you have underpaid and unhappy employees. And to this point, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple has this problem.
Apple will boost the frequency of security updates in OS X Mountain Lion and automatically install required patches for users, steps that bring it into line with Microsoft's practices.
Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.
Sometimes, when people ask me how useful my iPad is (meaning: compared to a laptop), I’m at a bit of a loss. How do you measure the utility of taking a ten-minute break to dip into Fotopedia’s spread on the Alhambra or to glance at the Guardian’s photo of the day? Hours of reading and writing can leave even the most bookish person starved for images and color. The iPad is a relaxation and consumption device for me (the laptop = work), but it provides a refreshment of eye, mind and spirit that surely do me more good than a whole suite of productivity software. I use it to look at art.
Apple’s real goal with these changes, especially with the combination of the Mac App Store, sandboxing, and Gatekeeper, is to disrupt the economics that keep the bad guys in business, rather than fighting a never-ending series of one-off skirmishes.
In an email to MobileMe subscribers on Saturday, Apple reminded them that they have just seven days to download their files and photographs from the service's iDisk and Gallery sections, respectively, and to move their websites from the iWeb portion of MobileMe.
The button is designed to show you as much information in a single window as is practical. It just happens that there’s a measure of leeway in how that’s interpreted and achieved.
For the most part, Mountain Lion appears to be a credible and compelling upgrade. It's good to see the enhanced security and direct support for social networking. For any Lion user that has a compatible Mac, I don't see any significant downsides. And, assuming the final release is stable and snappy, the $19.99 purchase price would seem to make it an upgrade that vindicates the promise of Lion and makes OS X a lot more useful.
I recommend you pick a task system as sophisticated as you need it to be, but not one bit more complex than that. It is just too easy to spend hours getting your to-do list just so and not actually accomplishing any of the tasks on it. If a task management system is too distracting or fiddly, find something else. After all, the goal of task management is to complete, not manage, tasks.
British startup Bardowl is pitching itself as a "Spotify for audiobooks", aiming to disrupt the business of Audible, which has built its business around selling audiobook downloads.
The quibbles about USB and ethernet are relatively minor compared to the features available in this mighty mite. For the money, the Express makes an effective base station for modestly sized apartments or homes, or where access is only needed in a few adjacent rooms in an office. This sleek model is the right choice for many, and at $80 less than the AirPort Extreme, a prudent one as well.
There are three things I’m going to share with you that I really like: faster previews, better white balance and shared iPhoto and Aperture libraries.
Apple is making potentially significant changes to the search algorithm in the App Store, at least according to some app developers. If you’re a developer or publisher counting on a well-chosen name to help with visibility, things could get tougher from here on out. But if you’re a popular and well-reviewed app, things might be looking up.
About 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in this country work in Apple Stores, as members of the service economy, and many of them earn about $25,000 a year. They work inside the world’s fastest growing industry, for the most valuable company, run by one of the country’s most richly compensated chief executives, Tim Cook.
If your workload demands that you need the performance of a MacBook Pro and your lifestyle requires you to carry it around a lot, the reduction in thickness and weight alone will be worth the upgrade to the rMBP. If you spend most of your time stationary however, you’ll have to be sold on the display and internal characteristics alone. The bad news is if the design doesn’t get you, everything else will.
There is no Communist cabal in China waiting in the wings to sabotage every successful foreign invested enterprise. Even that suggestion smacks of ignorance and misguided ideology. Apple is not being “allowed” to do well in China, it simply is doing well.
Some website experts recently tested the new version only to find that the system will pretend not to understand questions involving such as politically sensitive terms as "Tiananmen Square" and "6-4" (June 4, the date of the army's crackdown on the student protesters in 1989).As it will even not answer questions about how to get to the massive square in the center of Beijing, they suspect Siri is employing self-censorship to enter the Chinese market, according to Duowei News, a Chinese-language media outlet based in New York run by overseas Chinese.
Continuing a long string of similar cases, the Supreme Court will review a New York federal court decision that decided, in short, that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to any copyrighted product manufactured abroad. That case concerns textbooks.
Thanks to upgraded processors and graphics capabilities, along with both Thunderbolt and USB 3—features still missing from Apple’s Mac Pro line—for expansion, it’s getting tougher and tougher to say the Air isn’t a “full-featured” laptop.
Unless you are a creative professional who's looking to replace a desktop or a similarly high-end laptop, you likely don't need the Retina Pro. If all you need is computer for regular office tasks, but you want one that's thin, light and quick to boot, you can get a MacBook Air -- or a similar Windows-based ultrabook -- for as little as $1,000.
If you really need the MacBook Pro's Retina display capabilities now, go ahead and bite the bullet and buy one. If you absolutely have to impress your geeky friends, this’ll do the trick. If money is not an issue, there's no question that this is the computer you should own. Whatever the reason, you won’t regret having it - except maybe after you’ve schlepped it through the International Terminal for the sixth time in eight days.But for most people, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is not exactly a practical choice. In a year or so when the price comes down, sure, but not yet.
If you need to have multiple internal hard drives or PCI-Express cards for your video or audio workstation, the Mac Pro is without a doubt the most configurable Mac available. If your workflow includes one of the few applications that can take full advantage of 12 cores, then the speed increase may warrant spending the extra cash for a Mac Pro. But even for most power users, a new non-retina display MacBook Pro with its full complement of up-to-date connection types, may offer a better mix of upgradability, connection flexibility and processing power.
While we hope this may have cleared some things up for those following the Apple story, the fact remains that the sanctions rules and other export controls remain unclear to many companies and individuals, even as the Internet and new technologies mean that goods and services cross borders more than ever before. To that end, we are continuing to work on this issue as it pertains to communications technology and services. While there have been some improvements, the U.S. sanctions and export regimes still deny too many critical tools to activists working to secure freedom in repressive countries.As for Apple--which, as of 2:55pm on Wednesday, was still refusing comment on the story--we hope that the company will issue an apology immediately, help Sabet get her iPad if she still wants one, and further clarify their own policies to both the public and to their employees to insure an incident like this doesn’t happen again.
How timely: right as we seem to be reopening the debate over whether or not the iPad is a consumption or creation tool, Martha Stewart, the high priestess of crafty creativity, has launched a brand new iPad app called CraftStudio.
In its own letter, Apple said its approach reflects a "special urgency" in resolving the case because of public interests at stake and to vindicate its conduct. It repeated its "unequivocal position: it believes it has done nothing wrong and seeks a speedy resolution of the Department of Justice's lawsuit on the merits.""It is also a reality that the mere existence of litigation of this type creates marketplace uncertainties, which impact competitive conditions and the public interest," it said.
That coffee you're drinking while gazing at your iPad? It cost more than all the electricity needed to run those games, emails, videos and news stories for a year.The annual cost to charge an iPad is just $1.36, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit research and development group funded by electric utilities.
Thanks to a perfectly angled Fresnel lens, the HiveDock actually does magnify the image on an iPhone’s screen to the point where it feels like you are watching about an 8-inch screen.
Passbook is one of those announcements that is simply more than the sum of its parts. There is a lot of meat in this seemingly one-dimensional repository for scannable barcodes.
Apple may not like it, but all of these back-alley transactions are clearly meeting a market demand. The software may be buggy, incomplete, and not ready for mainstream consumption, but a sizable class of power users doesn't care and is willing to pay to use it.
Users should be able to make the reasonable assumption that anything they download from the App Store cannot and will not mess up their computer in any way that uninstalling the app won’t fix their computer. Now, TextExpander probably won’t screw up a persons computer, but then again, what if a user can’t figure out how to stop TextExpander from launching snippets, because they hid the dock icon and menubar icon — perhaps they don’t even know that TextExpander is the culprit? And there’s your problem.
A MacBook Air buyer is giving up upgradeability and onboard ports, but they’re getting something wonderful in return. It’s a fair trade. A dongle-fied Ethernet connector seemed like a trivial tradeoff for a computer that easily fit inside the newspaper pocket of my smallest bag.With the 15-inch Retina MacBook, all they’re getting is an extra quarter-inch of space in the large laptop bag that they’re still going to need to carry around. The consumer is giving something up and getting nothing of value in return. I argue that the Retina MacBook would have been a better product if it were made thick enough to accommodate Ethernet, socketed RAM, and more options for mass storage.
Still, the MacBook Air comes with some of the best hardware, software, and performance on the market. If you bought last year's Air, I'm not sure there's enough here to make you want to upgrade, but if you're in the market for a new laptop and don't need the power (or the price tag) of the new Pro, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than the Air. It may not be as ground-breaking a laptop as it was a year ago, but it’s still every bit as appealing.
What Launch Center does – and Launch Center Pro tries to improve upon – is adding the convenience of collecting a user’s most-accessed apps and actions into a single interface that isn’t an app – it’s a powerful link to other apps installed on a device,
TextExpander 4 also marks Smile’s break from the Mac App Store due to the sandboxing rules that went into effect on June 1st, making it the first major casualty of the new restrictions. Fortunately for Mac App Store customers, Smile has gone the extra step to ensure a smooth upgrade from the MAS version to their direct sale version. Once TextExpander 4 has been downloaded and launched, it will recognize existing MAS versions of TextExpander 3 and offer users the same discounted upgrade price as direct customers. As of this writing, TextExpander 3 is still on the Mac App Store and has not been updated with information about TE4 or the upgrade process.
Although China has a billion mobile phone subscriptions, the country has also been plagued by piracy. In the case of the iPhone, users sometimes choose to jailbreak their iPhones, allowing them to install paid apps for free.In China, this means every iOS app download generates about US$0.03 when comparing gross revenue against total downloads, according to App Annie. In comparison, an iOS app download in the U.S. generates $0.28.
The relationship between Apple and Yelp illustrates the power struggle over how people find what they are looking for on the Internet. Much more than just a clever feature, Siri is emerging as a key tool for what some in the industry call "casual search" - quickly finding routine information such as a restaurant location.This can bypass Google and other traditional search engines. That serves the interests of Apple, which sees an opportunity to muscle in on its rival's core business and build related advertising revenue.Siri is also a potential lifeline for Yelp and other content companies, which have found themselves competing with Google.
Apple Inc. is raising hourly pay for employees at its U.S. retail stores by as much as 25%, following an internal review period earlier this year.Employees said they were appreciative of the move, though they considered the raises had been a long time coming. The increased wages, one person said, more accurately reflected Apple's position as a high-end retailer.
Microsoft Surface is not fundamentally about Microsoft needing to control the entire integrated product in order to compete with the iPad on design. It’s about Microsoft needing to sell the whole thing to sustain its current profitability.
This move to a better screen, all-flash storage and the elimination of a physical slot for discs shifts the company ahead in its typical, pack-leading style. Power users will be thrilled by the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Average users will now consider the MacBook Air more seriously.
Wonderful as our gadgets and their interfaces are, there are times when they’re not entirely fathomable—particularly when you’ve clicked in the wrong place or pressed a key one time too many. Today I look at three issues caused by interface confusion.
Fast and energy efficient, but it may get in the way of your external display.
We plugged in two 1080p monitors using DVI to Mini DisplayPort adapters and connected another 1600 x 900 monitor over HDMI, and all of the displays lit up with Lion's well-known Andromeda Galaxy wallpaper.
The 2012 MacBook Air doesn't look any different than its last couple of predecessors, but the upgrades on the inside are what make the machine. Although Apple elected not to try and squeeze a "retina" class display into the MacBook Air this year, such a change would have come with great sacrifice to performance and battery life. And let's be honest—with the MacBook Air, there's very little wiggle room on either of those metrics. For me at least, I would rather have the performance and battery life.For someone like me upgrading from a 2010 MacBook Air, or even a MacBook Pro from the last couple years, it would be no question: go ahead and buy one of Apple's latest MacBook Airs. The performance increase is noticeable even during everyday use (even while using the lowest-end 2012 machine), and Apple finally gives users the option to upgrade from the soldered-on 4GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM in the Air.
Yes, it doesn’t really do much more than Spotlight and in fact it does miss some of Spotlight’s neat extras like solving simple mathematical questions, immediate results and the “alt+shift+click” feature to locate the chosen file in the Finder. But it extends the pool of data you can search to include Dropbox, Google Docs, Drive and Gmail. It also works fast and reliably at combining local and online storage into one easy and fast-to-use interface – but is that enough to make you want to use Found? To me it seems like Found might not offer enough unless you are deeply integrated into the Google ecosystem.
So long as you don’t actually delete the old version of the app within iTunes Connect you can continue submitting updates to apps even while they are in the Developer Removed from Sale state. Whether this is intentional functionality is unclear but I have verified that it does in fact work and the resulting approved updates are available for customers.
While I do have some quibbles, none are significant or insurmountable. Bento 4 for iPad is a great app for collecting and managing all your personal data.
The traditional MacBook Pros hold fast to their unibody form factor and design, upgradability, and price, and target the mid-market of non-creative professionals that seeks to balance features with affordability. The new MacBook Pros are not flashy like the new Retina MacBook Pros, but they offer advantages in price and the flexibility to get into the system and tailor it to your needs after purchase.
The other problem with this approach is that it makes it impossible to issue bugfixes or other minor updates to the previous version without making it available for sale publicly, which would lead to some new customers inadvertently purchasing the old version and being quite unhappy about it.
An Alpharetta woman and one of her friends say the Apple Store turned them away after they heard them speaking Farsi.A manager showed Viteri Apple's policy. It said the exportation, sale or supply from the U.S. to Iran of any Apple goods is strictly prohibited without authorization by the U.S. government. The manager also told Viteri they have to rely on customers to be honest.
Schumer told Reuters in a statement on Tuesday that he wanted Apple and Google to clarify their plans and ensure "they understand the significance of our concerns over the potential publication of images captured in people's backyards and other private settings."On Monday, Schumer wrote to the two rival Silicon Valley corporations, accusing them of "an unprecedented invasion of privacy" by using filming technology capable of imaging objects as small as 4 inches.
Apple needs to figure out a better way to do this. It is illogical, confusing, and, in the end, unfair for many users who will end up buying older versions of apps that have been upgraded.
Looky, a menu-bar utility for quickly popping open a live view from your Mac’s built-in camera, is at best a nicety, and at worst a bit superfluous. But it turns out that the utility can prove useful at times.
Apple has, with no change in the release notes or acknowledgement of the problems caused by version 1.2, released Thunderbolt Software Update 1.2.1 to add support for the Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.
Suddenly, he noticed a greenish splotch in the middle of the screen. You couldn’t miss it: almost dead center, as though an irregular puddle of a light green tint had been poured onto the graphics of his game.Alarmed, he restarted the computer. When it came to, the creepy misshapen area was still there. No doubt about it: The problem had nothing to do with software. It was a hardware problem, and it seemed he’d need a date with the local Apple store.
Another side-effect of what Apple is doing here is that it is devaluing the operating system in preference to looking at the hardware and the operating system that make up a computer as a single product.
Paul Dunahoo went on a business trip to San Francisco last week, where he attended technical sessions at Apple Inc.'s developer conference, networked with other programmers and received feedback from Apple engineers on his six productivity apps.Then, Mr. Dunahoo, chief executive of Bread and Butter Software LLC, returned to Connecticut to get ready for the eighth grade.
To me the fact Apple has ditched these indicator lights says one thing: whether your Mac is charged, asleep, or awake, none of it matters anymore — now it’s just: lid open, or lid closed?
No. You can’t.
The fact that the American online store is showing the same delay as the British suggests that it may be more the first two points; while the fact that Apple experienced the same problems with the launch of the new iPad suggests that even Tim Cook can't run a company that keeps everything in stock throughout massive demand for new products.
Most talk radio to me is a cesspool of disinformation. Podcasts, by contrast, are my go-to drive-time medium and what I listen to when I ride my bike or walk the dog.
For those of us who have been waiting for the high-resolution desktop and the imperceptible pixel boundary for years, this moment is exciting and invigorating. The PC is alive, healthy, and ready to tackle the next several years of innovation and discovery with the new display and the new technical foundation it's built upon. Welcome to the age of the Retina personal computer, and the new MacBook Pro is a wonderful machine to begin this transition.
The question is: Can Apple build a map service that does as good a job, or a better one, than Google has?
"So here comes the fun stuff," said Alex Limi as he began discussing the prototype iPad browser Mozilla has been working on for several months. "We wanted to make something entirely new. We wanted to look into how we could reinvent the browser for a new form factor," he said. He goes so far as to deem Safari for iPad "a miserable experience" all the while acknowledging that it remains the best option available in terms of tablet-based browsing.
The truth of the matter is that if private companies are in charge of public transit and they have vested interests in pushing their own (or partner’s) apps then they have little to no incentive in providing GTFS data to Google. One might think that easy availability of routing info via Google maps might increase these transit companies’ income, but at least the two big Austrian transit authorities do not seem to agree.
That’s no small achievement for a machine that delivers not only extreme portability but the sort of performance that, only two years ago, would’ve demanded a top-spec MacBook Pro. The addition of USB 3.0 and an HD webcam addresses two of the most common feature requests, and there’s minimal impact on runtime despite the more powerful processors.
I'd argue that Apple's push toward devices that are more about the human interface and less about the components is a form of a categorical imperative, a rule for acting that has no conditions or qualifications — that there is no line, there is only an endless drive towards progress: more portable devices that get the job done with less thinking about the hardware.
There are a lot of tradeoffs that go into product design. When it comes to laptops, there are capabilities (display resolution, processor speed, storage space, battery life, and so on), size and weight, cost, and upgradeability. Apple seems to have gotten the impression that upgradeability is the factor that people care about the least, and I suspect that they’re right.
The system allows for the government to broadcasat emergency messages, as it’s already done on television and radio. The push for alerts to appear on phones has gone on for a while, with other manufacturers already putting the feature into their phones. With iOS 6, Apple joins the fold.
Admittedly, the battery in the MacBook Pro is more powerful than the Air's: Apple rated the former at 95 watt-hours (Whr), meaning that it can produce one watt of power for 95 hours, or, say, 5 watts of power for 19 hours. The 13-in. MacBook Air's battery, on the other hand, is rated at 50 Whr.But while the 15-in. non-Retina MacBook Pro battery is also rated at 95 Whr., it costs just $129 -- the same as the Air -- to have Apple replace that laptop's battery.
I think it comes down to one of Apple’s core values: simplicity.
If the new MacBook Pro means that I have to take it in to Apple or TekServe for repair if it needs a new battery or has an issue with the screen – well, OK.Frankly, the fact that computers are now powerful enough to be built more as appliances is great news. This is progress – even if it rankles the collars of nerds everywhere.
This new-old Mac Pro will make me very happy for the next 12–18 months until the next model comes out, and then I’ll decide what to do. If the next one sucks for some reason, I can skip it. And if it’s good enough to buy, I’ll sell this one, probably losing about $1000 on it. To me, it makes sense to buy 12–18 months of high-end computing happiness for about $1000.
You might think that Apple positions all its notebook computers for aesthetic reasons. That’s partly true. The tables are uncluttered and the products are clean. But the main reason notebook computers screens are slightly angled is to encourage customers to adjust the screen to their ideal viewing angle—in other words, to touch the computer!
With the Retina MacBook Pro, Apple once again proves it is a company that refuses to sit still and get comfortable. It redefined the ultraportable laptop with the MacBook Air, and has now altered the concept of the “pro” laptop. Going lighter and smaller was expected, given how Apple does things, but the change in feature set will have current MacBook Pro owners reexamining their needs.The Retina MacBook Pro, however, is the future of Apple’s laptop line—and it’s a bright, shinning symbol of excellence. The Retina display is something to be marveled at, and the lightweight, smaller design addresses the demand for our devices to be even more portable. You’ll have to make a few adjustments, but fortunately, you don’t have to sacrifice performance. The Retina MacBook Pro is quite a remarkable laptop.
The icons are placed next to the previous relationship-related emojis showing a heterosexual couple holding hands and a heterosexual couple with a son. One shows two men holding hands. The other shows two women in the same position.
The MacBook Air costs a premium for its extra portability. Considering how well it sells, plenty of customers think it is worth the extra price. For someone constantly on the go that doesn't need things like an optical drive, FireWire, Ethernet, or the widest color gamut available, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend the 13" MacBook Air.In the end, however, the 13" MacBook Pro is the better value—you simply get more for your money.
Effectively, heat and fan volume are the same as the previous model, but the fan noise has a less irritating tone. If the previous 15” MacBook Pro design was too hot or loud for your preferences, the Retina model probably will be, too.
This fall, you can stop asking your friend “Are you here yet?”—your phone will tell you for them. According to Apple’s iOS 6 website, the company’s Find My Friends app is set to add a new geofencing notification system with iOS 6. This will let you set up an alert for any of your Find My Friends contacts; when they leave or arrive at a given location, you’ll receive an alert or banner notification.
You can go forward in the form of Mountain Lion when it ships, but you can’t go back to a previous version such as Snow Leopard. (This is largely about video drivers present in Lion that are missing in Snow Leopard.)
OS X’s Folder Actions let you attach AppleScripts to specific folders so actions are performed automatically as soon as you add items to the folders. Once you know the basics of how Folder Actions work, you’ll inevitably start wondering what cool things they can do for you. Here are three interesting Folder Actions to try out.
Baidu Inc. said Apple Inc. will be entitled to a share of advertising sales after the Chinese company’s search-engine was added as part of a software upgrade for iPhones in China.The revenue-sharing agreement with Apple follows similar accords between Baidu and manufacturers of handsets that use Google Inc.’s Android operating system, Wang Jing, vice president at Beijing-based Baidu, said in a phone interview today. He declined to disclose the commercial terms.
This is a laptop that stands poised to kill an existing one, one that Apple has dominated. The new Pro is good enough to make the old Pro (even the updated version) look and feel obsolete. It pushes and redefines the category, raising the bar higher than even its brethren can jump. If you can afford the premium and aren't set on a 13-inch model there's no reason to buy any Pro other than this Pro.
It’s not easy to describe in print, but a look at the screen tells the whole story. It’s like putting on glasses and realizing you’re near-sighted. Much like the screen on the latest iPad, the new display makes all other screens look dull and fuzzy.
Time Inc., once the magazine industry’s most ardent opponent of selling subscriptions through Apple, will make all of its magazines available via Apple’s newsstand, the two companies said Wednesday.The move is a significant shift for Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the United States. Even as competitors like Condé Nast and Hearst quickly struck deals to sell subscriptions through Apple, Time Inc. approached the Apple newsstand with caution, chafing at some of the restrictions Apple wanted to impose.
None of this is Apple's fault. It is just trending ahead of the curve. We're all doomed to be dependent slaves doing what we are told by the Geniuses and Gurus.
The new Apple laptop that went on sale Monday hits an impressive number of those high notes in one radical swoop. As you might guess, the one it misses by the biggest margin is “inexpensive.”
At WWDC, Forstall promised that "a number of auto manufacturers have already committed to delivering eyes-free Siri integration in the next 12 months." Yet of all of the automakers that Apple featured (Mercedes, BMW, GM, Land Rover, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda), just a few could confirm they were indeed working on delivering the technology within that timeframe. One automaker even seemed unaware that Apple had held an announcement.
When I sat down to review Apple’s new Retina-display MacBook Pro, I instinctively wanted to compare it to similar Windows laptops. I wanted to discuss how the specs stacked up and whether the price seemed fair. I hoped to contrast its industrial design with those of its closest counterparts.Then it dawned on me: There are no similar Windows laptops.
Not everyone needs or can afford the new MacBook Pro. But I wouldn't blame anybody who fancies one.
More important than the new MacBook Pro with retina display was the slew of mostly common-sense improvements to its underlying software that Apple hopes will make its products easier to use and more helpful. Taken together, they solidify what may be Apple’s biggest advantage: the user experience of its overall platform.
Apple may be stepping up its efforts to push out Java updates faster, even though Oracle has largely swooped in to take care of Mac users by issuing security fixes. The two companies released simultaneous Java updates for 10.7 Lion and 10.6 Snow Leopard on Tuesday, signaling that the two-month delay associated with the spread of Flashback malware could be a thing of the past.
It’s possible that Apple gets a break here because WWDC is an event for software developers, and isn’t the usual place to unveil the big revolutions. It’s also possible that the majority of those covering Apple actually do get it now.
This is a really big deal for gamers, because for the first time in Apple’s history, the company is providing its users with a social networking framework for games.
Apple actually modified the app so that it'll detect the phone's slight shifting of position and create an artificial gleam on a virtual knob meant to replicate a design feature from the 70s. Functional? Nope. Entirely superfluous? Yep. Impressive? Yep again, if only for its lunacy.
Like OS X itself, iTunes has a good number of hidden settings that affect how the program works and what options are available to you—some of them letting you revert to the behavior and appearance of older versions of iTunes.
The first thing I noticed was how much lighter it felt than the 15″ MacBook Pro I bought last year. I have plenty of experience toting that thing around the house and it truly feels like what my MacBook would weigh if it had no screen.
While Apple is already updating its own apps for Retina display, officials with third-party developers Adobe and Autodesk said they’ll need time to ship Retina-optimized apps to the public. Their Photoshop and AutoCAD applications, respectively, were shown in Retina form during Apple’s Monday keynote at WWDC, along with Diablo III from Blizzard Entertainment.“What was shown at WWDC 2012 was an unreleased build of Photoshop,” Marissa Lee, a spokeswoman for Adobe, said in an email on Tuesday. “This updated version of Photoshop is expected to be available later this year.”
Instead of relying on Google to determine the best bus to take in a city, the city (or developers in the city) can create their own tools. The City of New York, for example, could display estimated times of arrival for the next train at your stop. And biking. The existing toolset doesn’t allow for biking directions. An open Maps API could. By opening the Maps tool to the broader operating system, Apple has made mapping a functionality, not a separate application.
In an interview, Apple's senior vice president for world-wide marketing, Phil Schiller, said Apple has done a "tremendous amount" to help apps get discovered and discussed how Apple's new software for iPhones and iPads, called iOS 6, attempts to do more.But developers keep pushing for a bigger overhaul. "The design of the store is basically the same as when it had only a thousand apps," said Ben Hamey, co-founder of Bonobo Pte, whose apps include a program that lets users graph their braking and acceleration as they drive. "The top 100 paid apps list is very static and difficult to penetrate even with significant app sales," Mr. Hamey said.
Hardware manufacturers trying to compete with Apple constantly discover that they can only build competing devices off of Apple's rejected parts, or else build new factories from the ground up to manufacture the parts they need.
The mystery is what will happen to Apple’s laptop line as it picks up more and more features that we associate with the iPad. Like Apple’s tablet, the new MacBook has a Retina display, and it boasts seven hours of battery life, which is closing in on the iPad’s 10-hour mark. At some point Apple’s laptops will add touchscreens, too—touch will be too widely embedded in the computing culture for laptops not to have it. At the same time, the iPad will get faster and faster, in time matching the power of today’s laptops. And all the while, the Mac OS will keep picking up more and more features that Apple first showed off on its mobile OS.
Cook doesn’t mention the iMac, and Pogue’s reference to an update to the iMac in 2013 is incorrect, Apple said (which probably means that you can expect an iMac update sooner. The iMac, Apple’s all-in-one-desktop originally introduced in 1998, was last refreshed in May 2011.)
Apple tweaked the SSD form factor and switched to a different flash controller. The new unit is based on a SandForce SATA-III controller chip, but stamped with Toshiba markings. It’s still removable, meaning that folks will be able to upgrade the drive once third-party components become available. While the board bears visual similarities to mSATA, it is not using the same connector.
I was under the impression that Ping was in more of a “we don’t know what we’re going to do about it” state, not a “yeah, we’re killing it” state. For example, Ping is still there in the iTunes app in the iOS 6 beta — but, it doesn’t work.
I get asked all the time by people what MacBook I would recommend to buy. It used to be an easy answer, but it got a lot more complicated today. (Aside from everything I said above, do you dare buy a new Air when a Retina one must be in the works?) That's not necessarily a bad thing, we just happen to be at the beginning of a transition of the Mac into its next phase. In some ways, this is a mid-life crisis.
Something different happened during Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where the latest MacBook computers and Apple operating systems were unveiled. No one was talking about Mr. Jobs. They weren’t talking about Mr. Cook’s presentation style, either.
This will make things easier for all of us, and now maybe your mom and dad will actually do their updates themselves instead of waiting for you to do it for them when you come to visit.
Here’s a look at some cool features coming in iOS 6 that you may have missed.
Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed in an email to an Apple customer that the company is working on “something really great” to address the professional market.
Apple is actually quite good at a flat looking $7 per $9.99 purchase. They host the file and their iBooks Author is fantastic for book creation. Their app store customer service is about as bad as I can immagine (no phone, email or ticket support). You have to play by their rules and their rules happen to include error messages that block your book from being published with the descriptive “Unknown Error.” As a testament to their not giving single fuck, their “Contact Us” is a FAQ with no way to send a message. The book looks amazing on iPads through iBooks though!
PC makers are following the lead of consumers — not Apple — by making thinner notebooks. It’s actually not that easy to find a popular Windows notebook with onboard VGA. But for those customers who like that, the hardware is out there. They can get the laptop they want, not the laptop that they have to settle for.That’s a good thing. I don’t think I’d take that as a sign that any Windows manufacturer is stubbornly holding on to the past.
Although it’s unclear if all Thunderbolt-equipped Macs are affected, a number of people have reported that installing the update causes a variety of strange boot-related problems (kernel panics, getting stuck at the gray boot screen, “Unexpected error” messages, and more). Regardless of the details, in each case, it seems that the Mac is rendered unusable.
If it weren't for the Retina display, this MacBook Pro would seem to be just about what I expected from the infusion of some MacBook Air sensibility into the MacBook Pro line. It seems like there will be a day, in the not too distant future, when there's just a single line of MacBooks from a tiny 11-incher to this larger 15-incher. That day's not here yet—this model is too expensive right now to wipe out the lower-cost MacBook Pro models—but it's coming.
Here is what I understand about how it works – when using the system-level single sign-on, when you want to share something via Facebook, the system logs you into Facebook, shares whatever you want to share — a link, a video, a photo or whatever — and then logs you out.
Passbook doesn’t actually handle credit card transactions, yet, but if Apple ever decides to link it to customers’ iTunes accounts, it could easily replace the credit cards in your wallet or purse.
TomTom has independently confirmed to us that it indeed "has signed a global agreement with Apple for maps and related information."
The problem is Apple may have just laid claim to a huge chunk of turf that some automakers view as rightfully theirs. And since Ford has been among the most aggressive in pushing the boundaries of connected car services, it may very well feel Apple is asking it to give up too much territory.
Although the resolution changes, it never shows you what resolution the computer is running in. Like most of Apple’s software and hardware, this way of choosing a resolution will probably appeal to a lot more people because it’s not just numbers, but a visual choice.
Where the Air is tapered, this has a constant thickness throughout. So, again, it doesn't feel like an Air, but it's a big improvement over the Pro.
Here’s the catch: that’s less screen real estate. It’ll be crisper, but you can fit less on your screen. Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode, you’re seeing an equivalent 1440 by 900 resolution display, with 4x the “crispness.” That’s a downgrade in screen real estate, even if it is an upgrade in screen resolution.
The first Air was expensive and not for everyone, but it showed the future of Apple’s (and, really, the industry’s) portables. That’s what the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is: the future of portable Macs.
The Passbook that Apple announced on Monday is not quite a wallet, but it nudges us one step closer to turning our phones into pocketbooks.
The $29 Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter was already available in Apple’s online store early Monday evening.The second cable, a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter, was still awaiting its debut in Apple’s online store as this story was published Monday.
This will be a welcome change to photographers who used both Apple's pro and consumer-level photography apps. Previously, Aperture and iPhoto used different libraries, which meant that users had to import and export photos from one library into the other. Now, after a single import from the camera, all photos are available to both apps.
It protects the back of your iPad, not just the front.
Overall, the update to the Mac Pro is a relatively minor one—a speed bump and increases in RAM. Not only did the storage and video remain the same as in the previous models released in July 2010, but Apple didn’t see the Mac Pro fit for Thunderbolt, which is on every other Mac.
Apple’s vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, took the stage to announce that Apple’s newest OS X release will be ready for consumers to download in July. He also chose eight new features to highlight during the keynote, including some—such as Dictation on the Mac and Power Nap—that weren't included in the Mountain Lion preview we saw in February.
Apple on Monday took the wraps off iOS 6, the next version of the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Senior vice president for iOS software Scott Forstall told the developers and press in attendance that iOS 6 includes 200 new features, including Siri enhancements and Facebook updates.The updated mobile operating system is slated to arrive this fall.
The standout feature of the Retina-display model is the brand-new, high-density display. The new MacBook Pro's 15.4-inch (diagonal) screen has four times the number of pixels as the previous model at 2880 (horizontal) by 1800 (vertical), for a total of 5,184,000 pixels or 220 pixels per inch.
The new Airs—which come in 11-inch and 13-inch models—run on Intel’s third-generation Core processor (Ivy Bridge) family: a Core i5 chip in the standard configurations, with a Core i7 processor available as a build-to-order option. The updated laptops ship with 4GB of memory, but you can expand that to 8GB.
With this handy feature, you can attach AppleScripts to specific folders and have these scripts run automatically whenever you add files to the folders. That means that you can automatically get an alert when files are added to a specific folder, change the Finder labels when you put them in a folder, or unzip archives. Here’s how Folder Actions work, and how you can use them to save time.
Smartphones running Google’s Android operating system outsell iPhones more than two to one. And yet, even as Google’s system has gobbled up market share, Apple has held onto one critical advantage — the loyalty of mobile app developers.Many developers have continued to make applications first, and sometimes only, for iPhones. They find it easier to create software for Apple devices than for ones running Android, or it may be more lucrative. Their allegiance to Apple has helped make its devices the powerhouse they are for the company.
All of these products get you where you’d like to be: in a house with music in every room. And they can get there for much less money than a more sophisticated home audio network device. “Practical and affordable” beats “cutting-edge and expensive” every time.
Warning: Apple's new feature on its GarageBand app for the iPad may be habit-forming, creating a persistent and chronic time-suck that could swallow you whole.
Apple Inc.'s big conference for technology developers will swing into gear Monday morning with a keynote presentation that will end months of speculation about some key hardware and software initiatives.
The campus will include a four level basement that features an auditorium and 4,300 parking spaces.
Reverse engineering devices and protocols for the purpose of interoperability is a time-honored, and legally sound, tradition. Even in the notoriously draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), interoperability is carved out as an exception to allow fair use. Reverse engineering is, among other things, largely responsible for the PC revolution and the computing landscape we enjoy today. Should we stop providing users with products that work together simply because other vendors dislike competition?
Late Night Software has updated Script Debugger to version 5.0, a major new release for the AppleScript authoring environment. Script Debugger 5.0 introduces more than 30 new features, including script templates that can help you create new script documents more quickly, a tabbed document interface for viewing multiple scripts in a single window, and a new bundle editor that enables you to open resource files or drag new resources directly into a bundle.
Does a consumer buy a non-iPad tablet model to give the impression of being an iPad user? Or does the customer buy it for the different operating system or some other reason? Is every non-iPad tablet an iPad wannabe, or singularly unique in its own way? Those are just some of questions the Apple vs. Motorola and Apple vs. Samsung cases have raised.
“Because Phil’s title is marketing, people believe he’s focused on what’s on the billboards,” says Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray (PJC). “He’s much more important than people give him credit for.”Schiller shares many of Jobs’s passions and impulses. The big question is how well he can channel them into new ideas and products. Four former Apple managers say many consider him overly controlling and worry that he lacks the bold creative instincts needed to maintain Apple’s edge. Particularly in his expanded marketing role, some fear he will be a more conventional leader, prone to hyping products in ways that tarnish Apple’s hard-won brand loyalty.
When we think of technological development, we tend to think only about the jobs within the company's walls. But for many companies such as Apple, that's only the beginning of the story. There is also a multiplier process that can create many additional jobs in other areas of the economy.
If PC makers wait until there are no VGA projectors in use before they stop putting VGA ports on laptops, they’ve waited too long. Just copy Apple: get rid of the antiquated port, make thinner computers, and sell $20 adaptors for those who need them.
I suspect Microsoft is split internally between the traditionalists who want to make Office for iOS (and who may well have already made it on a contingency basis) because that’s where the market is and the Windows 8 people who want to keep Office for themselves. If a decision is being held up as this fight plays out, that favors the Windows 8 faction.
If you can visualize that hierarchy, and provide interactions that make sense to edit and view that hierarchy, there's no reason the same browser shouldn't be used for all types of data. It does not have to be a "wall." All your stuff ends up inter-relating anyway. Do you use the emailer to send music files? Yes of course. Do you use a text editor to write about the podcast you just recorded? Yes. So why have 20 mediocre tools when what you need is one really great one. Why not focus your investment on each type so that investment can be re-used in any context?
But flip a hardware switch on the side, hidden behind a panel, and you have full access to everything. If you want to tinker, you can. But if you want a secure, safe machine you can have that, too.
The software serves up a copy of an app's menu bar items right next to the cursor. You set a hot key combo to make the menu bar pop up (though you can't use the left or right keys).
While often the easiest solution for a faulty power adapter is to replace it with a new one, before doing this there are some steps you can take that will ideally address the problem.
It was a very high tech, futuristic and modern experience. As for my computer, I'm still remembering the nuances and commands, back from my advertising days. I'm pretty confident that I've gone Mac, and I'm never going back.
To adjust the volume in smaller increments, just hold Option+Shift and adjust the volume with the volume keys as normal. You should find that it jumps up and down in quarter notches instead. This also works for screen brightness, incidentally.
As Rentzsch lists, there are a few really strong reasons to buy from the Mac App Store — what he doesn’t say is that most of the reasons to buy direct don’t apply to the non-nerd population, which is most of the Mac user base.
So even if an app creates a geofence with a precise location, it doesn’t really matter since the triggering mechanism is based on a far less accurate location service. And if the geofence radius is too small, these inaccuracies might often make it fail to fire.
Apple has the best hardware-software-service integration in the industry, bar none. So the fact that the new device wars are now actually fought not on hardware specs but on vertical integration accords Apple a unique advantage.
We now know that Apple’s issue with Airfoil Speakers Touch was specifically related to its recently-added ability to receive audio directly from iOS devices and iTunes. This was not properly conveyed in our initial conversations prior to the removal of Airfoil Speakers Touch from the store, and Apple’s representatives apologized for the fact that the entire process was “poorly handled”.You may be asking why Apple would want to prevent users from having this functionality. Only Apple can provide a full answer here. We do know that Airfoil Speakers Touch’s ability to receive audio directly from iTunes and iOS enabled some users to forgo purchasing expensive AirPlay hardware, hardware which Apple licenses. It seems Apple has chosen to use their gatekeeper powers to simply prevent competition.
Finally Seagate and Western Digital, which dominate the hard-drive industry, have released Thunderbolt drives for the Mac, and they truly are super speedy and affordable.
Later this year, Apple is planning to oust Google Maps as the preloaded, default maps app from the iPhone and iPad and release a new mapping app that runs Apple's own technology, according to current and former Apple employees. Apple could preview the new software, which will be part of its next mobile-operating system, as soon as next week at its annual developer conference in San Francisco, one person familiar with the plans says. Apple plans to encourage app developers to embed its maps inside their applications like social-networking and search services.
The app manages it. Anything else would be crazy. Sounds a whole lot like iOS, doesn’t it?
Now, the Appsterdam team is stepping up its game by giving independent developers access to a database of patents and prior art that they'll be able to use to determine what could be asserted against them—before they launch their apps. The database is thanks to a partnership with Article One, a "patent research community" that works within 188 countries to help the little guys figure out whether they want to proceed with their plans, and how.
To avoid the limits of Apple's rules, ad networks that serve advertisements within mobile apps have started using new identifiers that collect information like location and preferences as the user moves across apps. One of the tracking systems is based on a unique identifier located in the iPhone's wireless networking hardware—a system known as Open Device Identification Number, or ODIN. The other prominent tracking alternative, called OpenUDID, uses the device's built-in copy-and-paste function.These networks claim they will lose millions of dollars a week in revenue unless they can gather personal data from users to better target them. Privacy advocates argue these new techniques could allow marketers to identify individuals and violate unsuspecting users' privacy.
Windownaut lets you place app windows in specific locations on the screen and remembers where they were placed.Keyboard shortcuts let you define any one of eight locations on your Mac’s screen.
Here’s a thought: geofence based calendar alerts. If my meeting is at my office, and I too am in my office, set the alert to only 5 minutes before. If I am at home and my meeting is at work, set alert for 15 minutes before.That would be cool, and that would be helpful.
It’s quite a challenge to do this with one small dialog — here’s hoping it gets changed in the next update. Perhaps just allow Apps to get to Photos while stripping the location data?
In addition to miscellaneous bug fixes, the update released over the weekend allows users to set geofenced locations for when the app should look for new articles that you may have saved from another device or the Web.
You can rely on Dropbox to deliver the simplicity of always having files up to date everywhere.
Photoshop CS6 is a well-rounded update. The noticeable speed boost provided by GPU acceleration of key features, combined with the background saves, make this a no-brainer upgrade in my opinion. On top of that, Adobe lowered the bar to entry for simple video editing and 3D compositing/rendering. It also simplified the interface, and the Creative Cloud pricing model is an attractive way to access the gold standard in image editing.
Specifically, when you currently use Facebook for iOS app “authentication” — for using your Facebook username and password instead of setting up a new one for the app — iOS switches you to the Facebook app for the authentication, then back to the original app to complete the login. The new announcement should log you in without switching to the Facebook app and back.That’s it! That’s the news.
After much speculation, Facebook integration will indeed be baked into the latest version of iOS, we’ve learned.
And I’m amazed at how fast and furious my thoughts flowed from head to fingers to screen.
By bringing up the prison thing, the EFF’s authors aren’t making their case more compelling. Instead, they’ve giving readers a convenient opportunity to roll their eyes and reject their argument. Especially readers who happily use Apple devices, and who bristle at people suggesting that they’re patsies for doing so.
Installing the Adobe Reader PDF plug-in can affect browser behaviour in various ways. It’s time, then, for an overview of what you can do with PDFs in your browser of choice, what you can’t do, and what you might want to figure out how to do.
The bottom line is that sandboxing has effectively collapsed the ambiguity and customers should now purchase their apps directly instead of through the Mac App Store.
Simply using it to buy in-game currency for power-ups seems like an entirely boring and forced implementation that consumers dislike. Let’s see developers being thoughtful and creative about IAPs, because those that do will be rewarded by customer loyalty and the benefit of those IAPs not only being bought, but bought happily.
I can’t remember the last time that I bothered with toting chargers around with me in my day-to-day life. That’s not only less weight and stuff to carry, but it’s a lot less of the fiddling with placing chargers.
“Now you’ve only got one week left to come up with a better name, or it’s going to be ‘MacMan,’ ” Steve said.
From Clock to Weather, you may have overlooked these capabilities.
As someone who uses Audition for podcasts and general audio dabbling I liked and used Audition CS5.5. But lack of support for control surfaces, clip grouping, and the like, made this application an unlikely candidate for audio professionals. With the return of these and other important Audition 3 features in Audition CS6, as well as the introduction of useful features such as skip selection and automatic speech alignment, pros not looking for advanced music features now have reason to give Audition a second look—particularly if they’re working with Premiere files.
The Smart Card Platform Technical Committee of the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) agreed a standard for so-called nano-SIMs on Friday. Apple's specification beat a competing proposal from Nokia, Research In Motion and Google-owned Motorola Mobility.
Dolly Drive is a portmanteau of remote storage, backup, and access options, none of which it provides any great depth of dials to twist. But most users likely don’t need many of the settings available with separately subscribed services. Dolly Drive could be a simple answer to a whole set of problems all in one package.
Even if you're already using iCloud after transitioning your account over from MobileMe, certain parts of MobileMe simply aren't available as part of iCloud. This is why it's important to make sure you grab all your remaining data, back it up, and potentially port it over to a new service.
Apple has quietly published a detailed security guide for its iOS operating system, suggesting that the company, known more for keeping technical details secret, is embracing a more transparent approach to security.
“By making iPhone available on pre-paid plans through Cricket Wireless, we are making the best smartphone more accessible to an even broader market in the US,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison told The Loop.
In the long run, sandboxing will have negative effects. Great apps won’t disappear, but I think it is likely that fewer new, innovative apps will appear. It will be an uphill battle for independent developers, who offer unique ways to make Macs more productive.
CleanMyDrive’s flagship feature is that it can automatically delete, whenever you unmount an external volume or a disk image, unnecessary files that clutter the volume when it’s mounted on other computer platforms: .DS_Store, .Spotlight, Thumbs.db, resource forks, and other OS-added metadata. CleanMyDrive will also empty the volume’s Trash when you eject the volume.
Mossberg and Swisher haven’t planned it this way—they scheduled a single tribute session in the middle of the three-day event, where Jobs’ close friend Larry Ellison and Pixar president Ed Catmull would share their remembrances of the late visionary. But it seems that almost every session has some reminder of the man who isn’t here.